


Nobody Chooses Their Times

by chipsaestrella



Series: Nobody Chooses Their Times [1]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M, Gen, POV Female Character, POV Natasha Romanova
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-12
Updated: 2012-08-12
Packaged: 2017-11-12 00:32:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/484644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chipsaestrella/pseuds/chipsaestrella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha is exactly 45 when she resigns. She goes to Prague, and then to Calcutta, and then to Johannesburg, and she lays low for half a year before the USSR falls. Natasha is smart enough not to think of it as of something more than a coincidence with her resignation, but sometimes she wonders.<br/>All the while she doesn’t look a day older than 25.</p><p>Or, a short, Natasha-centric piece about how Natalia Romanova, former USSR agent, became a SHIELD operative.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nobody Chooses Their Times

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, I have to say that English is not my first language and I (unfortunately) don't have a beta who is a native speaker, so I apologise for any mistakes in advance and encourage the readers to point them out for me.  
> Constructive criticism is always welcomed!
> 
> Secondly, I only saw The Movie and I know nothing at all about comics canon except for what I've found in Wiki. No offence was meant to canon anyway. (And I don’t own anything about Marvel’s Avengers)
> 
> Also, Natasha in this fic is clearly underage when she has a love affair (as she put it) with Winter Soldier, but I haven't written anything graphic (I can't do graphic for love or money anyway), so hopefully that's also not an offence to readers.
> 
> The title is a first line of an untitled poem of Alexandr Kushner (here http://poetrylibrary.ru/stixiya/vremena-ne-vybirayut.html you can find it in Russian). I could not find a translation so I translated the line myself (badly, I'm afraid).
> 
> Finally, I'd like to really thank my wonderful beta Kargona for her great help and encouragements.

***  
Natasha is exactly 45 when she resigns. Which means that on her birthday she doesn’t shoot the mark and doesn’t come back for her handlers even though one of them owes her 50 rubles for an old sport bet and the other a bullet in his brain for his wondering hand syndrome. She is generous like that.

She goes to Prague, and then to Calcutta, and then to Johannesburg, and she lays low for half a year before the USSR falls.

Natasha is smart enough not to think of it as of something more than a coincidence with her resignation, but sometimes she wonders.

All the while she doesn’t look a day older than 25.

***  
For the next 12 years she is a freelancer. She is deadly, and beautiful, and sometimes she feels old, ancient even, - all the while she doesn’t look a month older than 26 (on a bad day).

She doesn’t care about politics, or economic crisis, or Africa famine, - she is Russian, and she is about half a century old, one might say that she saw it all and more. She does a lot of dirty work, of wet work, a lot of things that probably would haunt her in the future. But she needs money, and she knows her ways well.

Still she is not without remorse (and never has been despite all the rumors, the thing is, sometimes in the old times she just was not exactly herself enough to care). Sometimes she doesn’t take an offer regardless of what the price is. Black Widow is allowed to have her little quirks.

***  
She fell in love once, in the early 60s, in the Red Room. He didn’t have a name (that wasn’t a problem, she didn’t have one at the time either), and they knew him as a Winter Soldier. He was a tutor, a mentor. He was without remorse or regret. They had something akin a love affair except that he didn’t love her, that much she knew.

She was about 17 when he went back to his cryogenic stasis bed and she finished her training and left the Red Room for the first time. She hasn’t seen him since.

She was a just a child then.

***  
She is not a child anymore. She is an old woman with a young girl’s face, and she can kill a man twice her size in a close combat, but she prefers poisons, and bullets, and her Widow’s Bites.

Sometimes she tires of working alone and takes on a partner. In 1997 she works with a young man (a boy, really) for about four months before she decides that enough is enough and finishes their deal. He is quite good. Their field is not really big, so never to hear about someone that good again probably means that the boy is dead. That is a pity.

She said that her name was Margarita and that she was a ballerina in Mariinsky. That was a lie even if once she would have believed it herself (her old Masters made pretty nice stories of her fake pasts).

He said that his name was Clint and that he grew up in a circus. That was probably a lie, too.

***  
Her old Masters made pretty nice stories of her fake pasts - in its early times the Red Room was used to program and reprogram its assets as the Masters saw fit. Later she was really disappointed when she’s found out that she’d never ever have been a ballerina. But even when they decided to give her (presumably) real memories back they’ve never told her who her parents were or what her real name was.

So she goes by Natalia Romanova, Natasha, since that was the name she used when she resigned. That was a name for an asset turned a free woman, and she feels that it holds some kind of a sentimental value for her.

She is not sentimental, but it’s a fine name nonetheless. Anyway, Black Widow is not a bad name for her either.

***  
In January 2003 in New Mexico she feels that someone is stalking her. She doesn’t have any proof, but she doesn’t actually need it. A gut feeling is good enough for her since it has been proving itself useful for several decades.

She cancels the job and flees to Jaipur. The stalker persists.

This is not the first time when someone is so interested in her. This is the first time when she knows that she is outplayed.

So she stops hiding. She buys the ticket for the first class and flies to London.

The weather is pretty awful there, but she doesn’t mind. She likes cold and she likes rain, and she is prepared to take out at least half a dozen of men sent for her, and it is really difficult not to show any kind of reaction at all when Clint, alone, comes into the little cafe, shivering, and sits at her table just as if they’ve last seen each other yesterday.

***  
She reads an awful lot. That’s a necessity that became a habit and a hobby, and the books contain shit tons of references which are pretty important for all kinds of jobs, from impersonating to code breaking.

Her memory would probably go to hell long before her face would cease to be pretty, and not because of the faults in a serum that they fed her in 40s and 50s, but because her memory was altered a lot in 60s and 70s and for these two decades she has large lacunae up to several months already.

But for now she is fine.

So when she greets Clint, ‘Not dead, then. I wondered,’ she suddenly remembers, ‘ _Столько раз могли убить! а умер старцем. Даже здесь не существует, Постум, правил_ *,’ and _now_ it is really hard for her not to burst into helpless hysterical giggles. But she is really good, so she manages.

***  
‘Still alive,’ he confirms, and smiles to the pretty waiter, and asks for a very large coffee, please, and smiles again, and Natasha remembers how skilled a marksman he was six years ago, and knows for certain why he was sent after her.

‘So,’ she says, ‘do you want to rectify that, or what?’

‘Actually, I want to make a job offer.’

‘And you are authorized to do it?’

He blinks.

The waiter brings coffee, but he doesn’t smile now.

‘Look,’ he says seriously, ‘that’s your only chance.’

‘Really?’

‘You can kill me, but that won’t change anything.’

The problem is, she doesn’t even want to kill him.

***  
She’s been working alone or with occasional allies for more than a decade but she still remembers what it was like when there was always someone watching her back even if she did not like that someone very much.

He offers her that feeling back.

***  
‘So,’ she asks, ‘what is your handler saying about it?’

That question makes him smile again.

‘Actually,’ he says, ‘you may ask him yourself.’

When he takes a transmitting pea out of his ear and gives it to her, he looks like a little boy conceiving mischief. She wants to giggle. Again.

‘His name is Coulson,’ he says.

‘Hello, Mr Coulson,’ she says politely.

The silence on the line makes her think about someone who is rolling his eyes pretty badly.

‘This is not a game, Ms Romanoff’, a voice in her ear says finally. ‘You are a smart woman, you should understand that.’

‘Everything is a game,’ she answers even if she doesn’t necessarily thinks that, ‘the question is what the stakes are.’

***  
The quarantine is five months and seventeen days and by the third month she is so bored, she thinks that probably isn’t worth it. At least in the beginning it was fun - as much as the intensive interrogations could be fun, anyway.

Clint (which is surprisingly his real name) is also under suspicion, but for him it somehow lasts for only two months, and he is just benched, not confined to his quarters, so he visits her regularly for these two months and after that if he is not on a mission, even if it is frowned upon by his handler (Coulson, who apparently can kill a man with a broken paperclip) and by his handler’s boss (Fury, who is making her nervous for no obvious reason at all).

Clint is funny, and professional, and annoying, and won’t recognize subordination if it bite him in the leg, so she is not sure how they make such a good team with Coulson as they obviously do.

She is going to find out.

***  
In the end it is Coulson who lets her out of the cell.

‘Welcome to the SHIELD, agent Romanoff,’ he says flatly, ‘I’m going to be your handler as if Barton is not enough for me to die of a premature heart failure’.

‘ _He is a great fun,_ ’ she remembers Clint saying, ‘ _but junior agents are just too scared of him to get that and other agents remember too clearly how they were scared of him when they were junior agents so they don’t get that either. I am his only hope._ ’

She smiles.

***  
Several days later Clint comes back from his assignment somewhere in Tunis or maybe Bangladesh and decides they must have a party. For Clint partying means getting as high up as possible and after that everything else is optional, so she brings the ice-cream and he gets them on the roof of some skyscraper or the other, where they sit, and eat, and talk for hours.

She teaches him to swear in Russian and laughs when he mispronounces all the vowels and then he mispronounces on purpose, she can see it, just to make her laugh more.

When Coulson steps on the roof two hours later they are lying on their backs and looking at the stars (however small quantity they can see among the clouds anyway), and he just sits (in his black suit and all) and looks first at them and then in the sky with them.

***  
Natasha is 57 when she is suddenly not alone anymore, and she decides to give it a try.

_fin_

**Author's Note:**

> *"Столько раз могли убить! а умер старцем. Даже здесь не существует, Постум, правил" is from Joseph Brodsky’s great poem, 'Letters to a Roman Friend'.
> 
> Here you can find it in English:  
> http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/joseph-brodsky/letters-to-the-roman-friend/
> 
> And the translation of these two lines goes like that:
> 
> Many times could have been killed! Yet died an old brave.  
> Even here, there is no ordinance, my dear.


End file.
